Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About hyperlocal

Migration and alternate reads

April 5, 2008 – 6:45 am

I’ve been a little busy for the last week or so moving across the country, although going weeks between posts isn’t really anything new here, eh? As always, I’m posting to Twitter far more often than I could hope to blog here.
While I’m slammed with life and work busy-ness, please check out the following [...]

Work with us, people

March 3, 2008 – 7:40 pm

GateHouse Media is hiring two reporters. Here’s the important bit from Boss Owens’ post on the matter:
The ideal candidate:

A recent college graduate (or graduating this spring)
At least six months experience blogging
Capable of shooting and editing his or her own video
Ready to do more than sit in an office and make [...]

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If you can’t beat ‘em, or buy ‘em, use the API

August 5, 2007 – 5:21 pm

Newspapers should produce amazing local databases with great maps, ratings and reviews.
A newspaper company should buy Yelp.
Yelp now has an open API. Newspapers should stop trying to develop something better, and use the API to provide users with Yelp’s functionality on their own sites, applied to their local businesses.
Apply that logic everywhere it makes sense. [...]

Just the FAQs, please

July 6, 2007 – 7:30 am

Jeff Jarvis on the Local Challenge:
“The biggest challenge facing local news organizations today is figuring out how they can gather more and produce less. That is, how can they help other people produce, so the news organizations have something worth gathering?”
Gather more and produce less, indeed. It’s hard for lifelong newsroom types to see [...]

Newspaper community site philosophy

June 19, 2007 – 9:47 pm

Steve Yelvington talks about Bluffton Today in an e-mail interview he’s posted, reminding me that there are reasons why community sites work and there are methods to manage and market them to the community:
“There’s a lot we can learn from Internet startups if we just recognize that geographic community is actually a special interest. A [...]